This is My Portfolio That I Didn’t Make
When you’ve got a lot of free time — like in my case, where I just finished my internship, don’t have a job yet, and still have to wait about 3 months to officially graduate as a Systems Engineer — you need to find something to do. Besides sending my resume to every job post that matched my profile (and getting zero replies), I figured I’d put together a portfolio with my projects, skills, and experience to see if that helps improve my chances of getting hired… and well, here we are.
The first thing I thought was: how can I make this as fast as possible, but still make it look solid? I wanted something that had all the important stuff, but also felt like “me.” That’s when I remembered Astro. I had never used it before, to be honest. I do have experience with frontend — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the almighty Angular — but frontend isn’t really my thing. So, I started looking for a ready-made Astro template that could fit what I was going for.
Luckily, I found this one you’re seeing now — it was public and ready to use. I downloaded it right away and started customizing it to my style, adding all my info. Just to be clear: I HAD NEVER TOUCHED ASTRO IN MY LIFE. I’ve always focused more on backend and data analysis, since design isn’t exactly my strength. And yeah, it took me like 8 hours to get most of the info in and deploy it to Vercel — and yes, it was a bit of a journey figuring out which file did what and where to change stuff — but hey, I pulled it off.
At this point, I’ve got a pretty good handle on how to manage the content. The site still has the touch of the original creator: Fernando López (https://github.com/EFEELE), who I genuinely thank from here for doing such an awesome job — seriously, without that base, I wouldn’t have been able to make this.
So yeah, if there’s something I took away from this experience, it’s that you don’t always have to start from scratch. That’s what the dev community is here for — to share, help, and save you time when you need it. In cases like mine, where all you want is to move forward, have something that works, and show what you can do, it’s totally okay to skip the “build it all yourself” part.
At the end of the day, what matters is having something that represents you and helps you take the next step. So if you’re in a similar spot — don’t feel bad about using templates or building on someone else’s work. What counts is what you do with it.